Critical Inquiry 

About: Critical Inquiry is an academic journal published by University of Chicago Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Criticism & Download. It has an ISSN identifier of 0093-1896. Over the lifetime, 1894 publications have been published receiving 77975 citations.

The Subject and Power

Abstract: The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call "dividing practices." The subject is either

The Narrative Construction of Reality

Abstract: Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Abstract: Wars. Somanywars.Wars outside andwars inside.Culturalwars, science wars, and wars against terrorism.Wars against poverty andwars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, theirmissiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are wenot like thosemechanical toys that endlesslymake the samegesturewhen everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for whichwe are so thoroughlyunprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising,

The evidence of experience

Abstract: Feminist historian Joan Scott’s classic essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” many times reprinted, extends the semiotic principle that there is no unmediated access to reality-that language, in the form of available discourses, prefigures our perception of the world-to the heart of the traditional historian’s notion of historical transparency, the evidence of experience. For most historians, from Herodotus on, evidence (a word derived from the Latin videre, to see), typically functions as the bedrock of historical truth and objectivity, since it is grounded in the testimony of those who actually experience “what happened.” The essay opens with Samuel Delany’s account of a visit to a homosexual bathhouse, an experience that, in its powerful visibility, persuaded him of the “fact” of homosexuality as a mass movement, shaping the shared lives of millions of men and women, in contrast to the view of homosexuals at the time as “isolated” marginal figures. Delany’s reliance on the “truth” of the evidence provided by his experience of the bathhouse is analogous to the historian’s belief in a referential notion of evidence that presents it as a “reflection of the real.”

The Climate of History: Four Theses

Abstract: The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: “Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. . . . Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. . . . Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? . . . Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”1 I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert ourselves into